Is The New Vegas Good For Guys?

Leach knows a lot more about glamour than I do, but visiting Las Vegas for the first time I feel like there's some incongruity here. The people make the city. If they're not dressing up, the city isn't glamorous. Meanwhile, I know for certain that glamour itself is not dead in New York. It takes on different shapes in Williamsburg, Wall Street and the Upper East Side, but people there have not stopped dressing and behaving glamorously.

The difference between New York and Vegas is two-fold: 1) The Strip population is entirely transient — and therefore anonymous — so nobody worries about the impression they make; and 2) As I learned from Bryan Bass, director of marketing for Surrender nightclub, there's no place that won't grant guests VIP treatment for the right amount of money. “If you want to feel like most important person at the club, and spend money, then we're going to do that,” he says. This second point separates a Vegas vacation from a trip elsewhere. Using New York again as an example, there are a handful of clubs that offer pay-for-play VIP treatment (some, like Lavo, under the same ownership as Vegas clubs), but in general, the trendiest spots are defined by restaurants that don't take reservations and nightlife that discriminates based on how you look, who you know, what you do for a living, and all those other factors that tend give nightspots their character and allure. Money is only part of that equation.

For a lot of guys, this explains the essential draw of New Vegas. After all, who wants to be told they're not cool or well-connected enough to come in somewhere? “As a guy coming to Vegas,” Bass says, "you now have more options and, in many ways, the ability to have a better time than you did twenty years ago. There's no risk that you won't have a good time; it's no gamble, you might say."

Culinary capital

The same can basically be said for Vegas restaurants. Like the pool parties, they offer an over-the-top experience of abundance and spectacle. Nearly all flagship restaurants in the Strip megaresorts are franchises of celebrity chef institutions elsewhere. Wolfgang Puck was the first to touch down in Vegas when he opened Spago at Caesars Palace in 1992. Since then everyone with a recognizable name has followed suit.

“We have the best dining in the world. Period,” says Maloof. “Best chefs, sous-chefs, servers.” On paper this is probably true. It may also be factual that Strip has the highest concentration of expertly-prepared food of any 4.2-mile stretch in the United States, not to mention flourishes like a glass-enclosed wine tower with rapelling 'wine angels' (women in spandex) at Mandalay Bay's Aureole and the rotating décor I mentioned above at Switch. In my experience, the food is universally above average, but it also costs a lot more than I'd spend on a typical dinner out.

Xania Woodman, who has been a Vegas nightlife writer for the last decade, told me that this is one reason people come here. “Vegas is a safe place for people to play, to do things that would be hard to justify at home,” she says. “This is the land of yes. It creates a sense of occasion. It's almost like a fantasy island.” While this is a point that most people would probably agree with, one criticism remains that the high-profile restaurants lack the sense of place that their originals have — the Vegas outposts are just copies slotted onto the boardwalk of a fantasy island.